In what ways is a mother like a tree? A mother—a caregiver, really, because lineages are built not merely by blood and biology but with tenderness and with time—nourishes and guards and shades the ones they love. Whether or not the “mother tree” theory is factual, the phenomenon of family is not specific to humans. A tree’s roots extend toward its kin, cultivating a clan of earth-tenders. The lexicon of familial genealogy echoes the arboreal: “The apple doesn’t fall far”; a “family tree.” Prompted by Rose Marie Cromwell’s ongoing series of images, A Geological Survey (2022–23), I pondered the metaphysical kinship of motherhood and nature, moved by the visual parallels between the photographer’s mother, her young daughter, and California’s ancient redwoods. For this project, Cromwell, who has long photographed communities she describes as chosen family, captured her birth family as they traveled together through off-grid spaces in Northern California and New Mexico. It was an attempt, she explained to me recently, “to say, Yes, I am looking at the landscape, but I’m doing it through a feminist lens.” I’d met Cromwell at her recent exhibition, titled after the series, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, long after opening night; without crowds, we had the luxury of space. Her lens, for me, centered matrilineal relations and the ability to see oneself in the earth, with the ecosystem itself a kind of relative. “It was a healing journey,” she added. “A healing journey with the land, a healing journey with my family.”
Rose Marie Cromwell, The Face, 2024. Courtesy the artist.
The cold professionalism of A Geological Survey’s title is tongue-in-cheek, sending up the history of men—photographers, land surveyors, prospectors—who’ve appraised and subjugated the American West. Cromwell’s photos are rendered in black and white, similar to the formal approach of photographers like Timothy H. O’Sullivan, the official photographer for two major governmental surveys of the West and Southwest in the late 1800s (first of the fortieth parallel and later the area west of the Hundredth Meridian), and Ansel Adams, who found inspiration in the record of such expeditions. But Cromwell, who was born in Sacramento and raised in Seattle, documents these regions not simply to chart them but to readdress them, implicating herself and her people in the land. A rocky hillock; a tree stump; the soft, weighty fruits of a date palm: in spaces where the aforementioned photographers deigned to purport themselves mere observers, Cromwell and her family revel. Cromwell’s daughter, Simone, peeing in the sand. Laurie, Cromwell’s mother, bundled like a baby in a hammock. A perky bunch of plantains; an elegant bundle of elegant walking sticks. And always the light, reverent and glorious.
Rose Marie Cromwell, The Shower, 2024. Courtesy the artist.
It bears repeating: the light. Illuminating the soft lines of a grandmother’s brow (The Face, 2024); shadowing the limbs of a half-nude silhouette (In the Bushes, 2024); unexpectedly spotlighting the edges (and only the edges) of a mountain (Rearview, 2022). Cromwell’s light frames her subjects with love and suggests, by their long and unyielding shadows, the height of those aforesaid redwoods above them. “Staying in them, walking through them with my mother and daughter: there’s some energy in those trees,” she told me, alluding to their palpable liveness, a sentience she once felt as an adolescent during road trips across the West and Midwest with her mother and stepfather. “Although he wasn’t Indigenous, my stepfather had a lot of reverence for these lands, and a deep respect for their communities.” She remembers the Black Hills’ sweeping mountain ranges, the fire-colored stripes and peaks of the Badlands of South Dakota, and how she knew, profoundly, “that these were important lands, that they were special.” For these works, Cromwell immersed herself and her beloveds in those special places. In one image, On Her Back (2023), Simone arranges rocks in a perfect row along her grandmother’s spine; in another, The Shower (2023), Laurie delights in the spray of an outdoor shower. The two stir from a nap together. Cromwell herself kneels in drybrush, her hair sunlit and fluttering. As some creation myths suggest, humanity descends from the earth, roots, dirt; A Geological Survey suggests the easy verisimilitude of those stories. The redwoods, often unseen in these photos save for the shade they cast over Cromwell’s subjects, are of course mother trees, communicating with their descendants. Entangled with the fragments of the terrain, Cromwell seems to offer her own reverence for her predecessors—literal, spiritual, geological—and to invite us to do the same.
Rose Marie Cromwell, Rearview, 2022. Courtesy the artist.
After her mother bought Cromwell her first camera, the photographer’s relatives, including her mom, were some of her first subjects. But in graduate school, “where everybody is photographing their family, there can be a lot of navel-gazing,” Cromwell noted. “I think work that’s personal should also be global or political.” Cromwell has spent long stretches of time documenting the residue of imperialism—and the tight-knit communities flourishing in spite of it—in Coco Solo, Panama, for the project King of Fish (2007–ongoing); the cosmology of la charada in Havana, for El Libro Supremo de la Suerte (2009–16); the ineffable strangeness of Miami, where she lives today, for A More Fluid Atmosphere (2017–ongoing). She wouldn’t publicly showcase her personal life in earnest until her daughter’s birth in 2020, an experience that was, Cromwell recalled, spectacular and terrifying. After laboring and delivering at home, she began hemorrhaging; her midwife stopped the bleeding manually, saving her life before transferring Cromwell to a hospital to ensure she didn’t need a blood transfusion. During the forty-eight-hour labor, Cromwell’s doula had asked her what she was afraid of. “The pain was all-encompassing. I was afraid of dying,” Cromwell said. “You’re giving birth,” her doula had replied. “You can’t be afraid of death. You’re about to meet your soulmate.” The COVID-19 lockdown began two months later. Alone at home with her husband and infant, Cromwell processed her matrescence in relative isolation, photographing her changing body, her lush backyard, her new baby. “That’s when I realized it was valuable to photograph my own body and my own daughter, as someone who has photographed other people’s communities over the years.” She compiled those images into a book, entitled Eclipse (2020). “It opened me up to the possibility of making work with my blood family.”
Rose Marie Cromwell, In the Bushes, 2024. Courtesy the artist.
Beyond the return to working with her family, A Geological Survey also marks Cromwell’s new openness to the sensitivity permitted and demanded by motherhood. “Motherhood has made me a more empathetic person, and I think empathy can make you a better artist,” she shared with me. The works comprising the series are appropriately collaborative, the way road trips are often collaborative, shaped by the needs and whims of each passenger, with Cromwell ceding control. Traveling with a toddler and an elder had its challenges, but both were active participants in the image-making process. The shower portrait was Laurie’s idea, while Simone, Cromwell said, has developed boundaries regarding her likeness, knowing when to tell her mother, “That picture of me—it’s not for a gallery.” Cromwell has said she exists at a precipice between her mother and daughter, watching them age. Playing and making art under the gaze of the redwoods and the desert, all three generations of women seem like children, protected by the most enduring of matriarchs.
Beneath the landforms and brush, though, Cromwell recognized the fragile precariousness of the earth. She considered the droughts, the wildfires, the ceaseless exploitation of resources; we spoke just months before January, when a catastrophic number of fires spread throughout Los Angeles, devastating parts of the city at an unprecedented rate, affecting the air quality of nearly the entire county. The complete loss of life is still unaccounted for. “What will happen when Simone is my age? Does she want to live with constant smoke pollution?” she’d asked back at the ICA, pausing at a photo of her daughter. “I think that is an anxiety a lot of mothers feel.” The landscape photographers she reimagines were “messengers of expansion and ‘progress.’” Now all that expansion has stripped the soil of its nutrients, heated the earth, diminished the trees. This survey documents something far more tenuous. “I know that our time is limited,” Cromwell mused, referring to the trips with her mother. “To be able to spend it with her is a blessing.” The majesty and beauty of Cromwell’s topographies belie their impermanence—of both place and time. If we move with care, change and transformation might be gentle instead. The rough parts of familial relationships can soften with age, the passage from one role to another (daughter to mother, mother to grandmother) transforming those bonds anew.
